Finnish words for snow

Everybody has heard that the Eskimos have over forty different words
for snow; quite a few people also know that this is an
urban legend.
What you probably did not know, however, is that Finnishdoes have
over 40 words for snow -- at least if we stretch the definition a bit to
include all forms of frozen precipitation. Please note that absolutely
no compound words are included, and I have even attempted to avoid
including multiple words from the same root, eg. quite a few of these
nouns could also be made into verbs or adjectives.

Some of the above are pretty obscure, but these are downright bizarre.
Finns who do not speak the dialect in question (marked in parentheses
if known) will not understand these. And note that this is only a small
sampling, linguists have recorded literally hundreds of these.

hölse: slush

höty: loose snow

höttyrä: loose snow

höyty: loose snow

judake: reindeer track in snow (Lapland)

klossakko: slush

komo: raised ice

kieppi: snow pile

mora: uncompacted, unskiable snow (Lapland)

triimu: snow pile (West)

triivu: snow pile (West)

purku: snow shower (East)

pöykky: snow pile (Tampere)

Borderline cases

Depending on context, these may or may not refer to snow.

keli: weather conditions; the "skiability" of snow

pulveri: powder; very cold, fine, powdery snow

valli: wall, blockage; a wall of snow (natural or manmade)

But guess what?

Despite all this, Finnish lacks the verb "to snow"!
That's right, to say
"it is snowing", Finns have to state sataa lunta ("it is raining snow")
or more colloquially tulee lunta ("snow is coming").
To fix this, I have used the noun lumi (snow) to derive the verb
lumista (to snow), as in ulkona lumisee, "it is snowing
outside". Alas, my efforts to propagate this meme have so far been
largely unsuccessful...

Conclusion

So what does all this add up to? Not much, necessarily. It is fairly
obvious that a language spoken in a northern climate like Finland will
develop lots of shorthand to explain common weather conditions.1
This does not prove the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, since the concepts
themselves are still explainable in English; you can still probably imagine
what large chunks of snow frozen onto tree branches look like without
knowing the word tykky.
And, on a personal note, as a typical Finnish
city dweller who spends most of this time safely indoors in places with
central heating, I find much of the vocabulary above just as bizarre and
useless as my gentle reader probably does.

1: Incidentally, the Sami language spoken in Lapland has even more
excruciatingly detailed words for snow. Some of the weather-related
terminology used by Sami reindeer herders can be found here:
http://tuikku.urova.fi/avoin/poronhoito/terminologia.htm

References

Sources used for this list include, but are not limited to, the following: